A neighbor on Bruce told us during one of these trips that there were cats living under the house, a female and a litter of half-grown kittens too wild and scary to get close to. She said she had been feeding them, but she was going away and did not know how they would manage. She said that there was also a tremendous black tomcat in the area, equally homeless and unapproachable. This is a too-common situation in Florida. Sappy tourists who stay for a few months acquire the pretty kitty for the kids, then deliberately abandon it when they leave rather than take it with them or deliver it to the animal shelter. As a result there are thousands of cats in a semi-wild state, living in uncleared lots and in wild areas of the keys, scavenging for a living and doing badly at it. There is no point in railing at the class of human who will do this. Theirs is an insensate stupidity beyond the possibility of shame or blame. If you, reading this, have a vague uneasy memory of having abandoned a vacation cat somewhere, rest assured that darling kitty did not find a nice home. It ended in the brush, railthin, scabrous, and scared, wondering what the hell happened to the darling people. Cats hang around a long, long time before they finally give up. They have a powerful sense of place — a den-affinity. To be locked out of the den is beyond comprehension. It is only the transients like ours who learn to unpack their suitcases anywhere.
We borrowed a cat trap from the humane society, an oblong cage with a trigger-place for the food which would drop the wire gate down. We would set it in the evening and go over and check it in the morning. One at a time we caught the female and her half-grown brood. The terror of the trap loosens the bowels. It was an untidy chore driving them to the shelter, hosing the trap down, resetting it. The animal shelter would try to place them, and, failing that, mete out a swift, painless death.
After we had cleaned out the colony under the house, we kept setting the trap and baiting it. But it remained empty. I caught a glimpse of that tom disappearing into a palmetto patch, looking back over his shoulder at me. The sun caught the high gloss of his black coat. He did not slink or cringe. He prowled, obviously foraging successfully, too savvy for box traps. Soon it was time to go, and we gave up the futile attempt, imagining that when we returned two and a half months later, black tom would no longer be around.
We checked outgoing train schedules, airmailed Dr. Sellman when to expect the cats, took the nervously mewling crate down to Railway Express, and sent it out, with food and instructions, prepaid.
Thus was devised the system we followed for years. Dr. Sellman would hold them until we announced our arrival and send them along. We would ship them back and he would hold them until we could pick them up and take them to Piseco.
From time to time during that period, Dorothy and Johnny would try with a carefully plausible argument to talk me into taking them north in the car — a nest amid the luggage, mild tranquilizers, maybe collars and leashes for roadside relievings, smuggle them into motels. But I never fell into the trap of being obliged to come up with a logical refutation of each point. I merely expressed vast astonishment that two otherwise intelligent people could even pretend to propose such chaos.
I can imagine, for example, how they would react to leashes. Once we were able to give up the toilet-box-system on State Street and give them continuous access to the out of doors, we never saw them go, except very, very rarely and then through the accident of taking a walk and coming across one of them in a remote place. It was a private and fastidious affair, one that they certainly would not undertake while at the end of a string.
...In the last couple of years the infirmities of age have at last led Roger to consider comfort more important than total privacy. Our screened terrace at Point Crisp is very large, with numerous planting areas full of peat moss and heavy growth. He began to use a far corner of it, behind a screen of dwarf banana. We have made it more suitable with a frequently replenished layer of kitty litter. Last Christmas Johnny and his wife, Anne, drove down from Michigan in a VW bus bringing their five cats with them — thus proving his nerves are better than mine have ever been — and they spent the holidays in our guesthouse. They had one adult cat, two almost adults, and two kittens. (The smallest female kitten was named Abishag after the biblical virgin taken into bed to keep the venerable king warm.)
Their cats were trained to kitty litter in big, shallow plastic pans. They put one in the guesthouse and one in the studio near the door to the terrace, which was propped ajar so Roger could get out there when the need arose. The weather was cold and uncomfortable for an ancient cat, and he was feeling unwell during the holidays. He took advantage of the convenience placed there for the new generation. As it had been almost eighteen years since he had used such a device, and because he is a very large cat, his first attempt was a total failure due to his getting only his front feet into the plastic bin. But from then on he was ept, and after the kids and their cat-colony had departed and the weather stayed cold, we continued the arrangement. When the weather warmed, Roger, by his own decision, reverted to his familiar area beyond the dwarf banana trees.
In addition, I knew exactly how the cats would react to a collar. When Geoff was small he was limply content to have our small boy dress him in improvised garments. Johnny also, without damage to his eventual unmistakable masculinity, owned a doll bed when we lived on State Street, and Geoff would sleep happily therein, head on the pillow, blankets tucked around him, a rather startling sight to come across in the living room when you were walking through with your mind on other matters.
As Geoff reached maturity, his attitude changed. He would endure having people put things on him, but it depressed and humiliated him. He would stand somewhat in the position of a steer with its rear end toward a blue norther, and look patiently, enduringly miserable. When he was disrobed or de-hatted, his relief was apparent.
Roger, on the other hand, has always been the clown cat. And has always relished attention. Having anything put on him was his signal to prance and race and show off.
That would have been our roadside tableau — Geoff standing utterly hangdog, and Roger deciding we wanted him to climb the leash hand over hand.
Regarding motels, I remembered too clearly a tale my sister told, of one night in a motel with Buckethead. The cat slept a couple of hours, awoke feeling all too spritely, having been shut up in the car all day. The room walls were of that kind of pressed composition board she could get her nails into. So she invented a game of running up the wall, springing backward into the air, turning, and landing in the middle of either Dorrie or Bill. In about twenty minutes of that, Buckethead had the whole show back out on the road, and Dorrie recalls that before they left Bill spent quite a while pressing the little triangular tear marks in the walls back to invisibility with his thumbnail.
I was obdurate. There were vast reaches of Georgia and the Carolinas sufficiently depressing without the tireless ululations of car-hating cats.
Eight
The cats had their first full summer at Piseco in 1950, and they were busy the entire time. In Florida they were more indolent. At Piseco there seemed to be a flavor of industrious self-importance about them. They would hurry in and eat and hurry out. They were working at the trade of being cats. Those summers, from 1950 through 1957, were the summers of their prime, when they were both at their heaviest, their pelts the glossiest, their agility and condition at peak. They ate hugely and with minimum selectivity and ran it all off. Always, at Piseco, their rich coats had an incomparable smell, a sweet, fresh, airy odor related in some way to washing which has been dried in the fragrance of a spring wind.